


I Am Who?

by wordbending



Category: O Human Star (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Trans Alistair, Trans Female Character, autistic alistair, autistic sulla, talk of gender dysphoria
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 12:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11646579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordbending/pseuds/wordbending
Summary: “Did you ever… did you ever wonder if you were… like… like me?”Al stood up. A million thoughts raced through his mind, but only one stood out.“No.”“You… you didn’t?”“No, I am nothaving this conversation.”------Al and Sulla discuss gender.





	I Am Who?

**Author's Note:**

> Requested by [excusemethatsnotcanon](http://excusemethatsnotcanon.tumblr.com</a)! Thank you so much!

Alistair Sterling paced.

He was doing that a lot lately. Pacing. He wasn’t usually much of a pacer - he preferred to work rather than wander around aimlessly. But he had little to work on these days, with Brendan handling everything while he adjusted to his new life. Still, his brain went stir-crazy if he sat around in one place too long.

But, as Alistair paced down the hallway leading to his room, he noticed something… odd. He found himself suddenly covered in darkness, as if there was a shadow over him.

There  _was_ a shadow over him.

A humanoid shadow. A humanoid shadow carrying a bag on a strap, a bag that was hovering in front of him. Without even noticing, he’d been milliseconds away from walking right into it.

He looked up and found himself staring at a young girl’s back, a young girl that was floating next to the ceiling. Jets of fire streamed out from under her boots.

_Oh,_ he realized.

“…Hey, kiddo,” he said.

Sulla jumped, which Al realized could only have bad results when she was floating. Sure enough, she nearly flipped over, flailing around with her arms and legs as she tried desperately to right herself. Her flailing legs sent her even further off-balance, sending her careening slowly left and right, up and down.

“Whoa, whoa!” Al said, reaching out for her, but it was too late - the jets under her feet shut off, either as a safety measure or unconsciously, and Sulla dropped. Quickly, Al reached out his arms for her, holding them out to catch her.

She landed in his arms and he nearly felt them break. She didn’t weigh nearly as much as he might have expected a robot to weigh, but she  _definitely_ wasn’t an average weight either. He had to remind himself he was just as much robot as she was now - he couldn’t have imagined what she’d done to his arms if he wasn’t.

“Well,” Al said to her. “That was close.”

Sulla blushed, her cheeks turning a light shade of pink. But whatever embarrassment she’d had about her clumsiness faded and she grinned up at him.

“Haha, yeah,” she said, disentangling herself from his arms and gently floating back down to the ground. “Sure was! Thanks.”

“So, uh,” Al said, putting his hands in his pockets. “What was  _that_ about? The floating?”

“Oh,” Sulla replied, looking away. Her cheeks turned slightly pink again. “Uh, I just… do that sometimes, you know? When I’m thinking about stuff. I just like to…”

She made a wavy, undulating motion with her hand.

“Float around, I guess.”

“Ah,” he said. She really was so similar to him. Her face, too - it always made him feel strange seeing it, like he was looking in a funhouse mirror. But he always tried not to let that show in his expression - he was good at that. “I see. What were you thinking about? If you don’t mind me asking.”

Sulla’s pink cheeks turned outright red. She glanced towards him for just a moment, then glanced away.

“S… stuff.”

Al gave her a tiny smile. “About your little friend?”

Sulla laughed. “No! Come on, that’s just mean.”

“You’re right,” he said, still smiling. “Sorry.”

He turned towards the exit to the hallway, leading out towards the living room, waving a hand over his shoulder as he passed.

“Well, it’s fine if you don’t want to share. I’ll leave you be.”

He was turning the corner when he heard her voice again.

“Wait!”

He stopped dead in his tracks, looking back towards her. She had a hand raised against her chest, clenched tightly into a fist, and she was frowning.

“Can… can I… talk to you? About something?”

Al raised his eyebrows.

“Sure, kid. Of course. You want to sit down?”

“I…” She trailed off, then nodded. “Yeah.”

Hands still in his pockets, Al walked slowly towards the living room. Internally, so many red flags were going off in his head that it could have supplied a fleet of Dutch ships. What on Earth would she want to talk to him about, of all people? It was good that she trusted him, but… he didn’t feel like he was good with kids, like Brendan had used to say he was. Quite the opposite.

He sat down on the couch, sitting normally instead of collapsing into it as he might normally. Sulla sat slowly and politely into an armchair across from him, resting her hands on her knees. She tapped her fingers against them.

“So… what’d you want to ask?”

“It’s, uh…” Sulla cringed, curling into herself. “Personal. Like, super personal.”

More red flags. He was going to run out of those.

“…Go on,” he tried, keeping his voice calm.

“It’s not just… about me,” she admitted. “It’s about  _you.”_

Officially progressed past red flags. Now it was just a blaring alarm.

Al’s eyes narrowed. She took one look at his expression and raised her hands in front of herself, waving them back and forth rapidly.

“You… you don’t have to answer!” she said quickly. “You don’t have to say anything! I was just… I was just curious, that’s all.”

Al felt a familiar jolt from somewhere in his memory, a jolt of panic. If he still had a heart, it would have been pounding. Instead, he felt his head start to hurt.

“Curious…” he said, very slowly. “About what?”

Sulla began to toy with the straps of her bag, twisting and bending them in her hands. Her face was bright red.

“Did you… did you ever…”

The jolt of fear going through Al became outright dread.

“Ugh,” Sulla sighed, shutting her eyes. “This is stupid.”

Al swallowed. He had an out right there. He could just say it  _was_ stupid and walk off. And, God, was he ever tempted.

But she looked so uncomfortable, so unsure. Whatever this was, it must have been driving her nuts. He couldn’t do that to her.

“No,” he said. “It’s… fine. What were you curious about?”

Sulla looked straight at him, her bag strap clenched tightly in her hands. Even with her face as red as it was, her gaze seemed to pierce straight through him. He felt his own hands clench into fists.

“Did you ever… did you ever wonder if you were… like… like me?”

Al stood up. A million thoughts raced through his mind, but only one stood out.

“No.”

“You… you didn’t?”

“ _No,_ I am not  _having this conversation.”_

Without looking at her any further, he started to walk - no, not quite - he started to _storm_  out of the room, his expression dark.

What stopped him was when he heard crying.

He turned back around. Sulla was looking down towards the floor, taking shaking breaths. Tears, ones he couldn’t tell if they were synthetic or not, rolled down her cheeks.

He felt his non-existent heart snap in two.

“Kid, kid…” he said, rushing over to her. He crouched down in front of her, reaching for her shoulders, but she recoiled from him, covering her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have…”

“No, no,” she said, sniffling. “It was… it was stupid.  _I_ shouldn’t have… I should have known…”

Now it was Al’s turn to cringe.

“That doesn’t matter,” he said, as firmly as he could manage. His voice still shook anyway. “I shouldn’t have… stormed off like that. I shouldn’t have gotten angry. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. OK?”

Sulla remained still, biting her lip.

“OK?” Al repeated softly.

She nodded, though her eyes were still wet. “OK.”

Al smiled. “Good. Now… let me sit down. And we can talk.”

He stood up, walking back towards the couch. He felt his legs quake, his knees shake, with every step he took… it amazed him that he could even stand. But he stood, and he walked.

When he took his seat again, he was the one coiled like a spring. His shoulders were hunched, his back straight, his knees tightly pressed together… he felt like when he used to be called to the principal’s office when kids bullied him. When he fought back.

“When… when you say,” he said, slowly, trying to find the right words. They seemed to be constantly evading his grasp, going through one side of his head and out the other. “‘Like me’, do you… do you mean?”

“A girl,” Sulla said, her voice barely a whisper.

Al swallowed thickly. Right. Right, of course.

He felt a terrible, terrible feeling in his gut. Something dark. It was if there was a voice in there, something black and horrible, screaming at the top of his lungs to say nothing, to stop this conversation, to scream and argue and flip things over if it just meant  _ending this._

But, with Sulla, he couldn’t do that. The voice that told her she deserved to know, that he trusted her, was the louder voice.

“Yes,” he said flatly. The word escaped him like it had been punched out of him. It came out at odd angles, seeming to stab him from every direction. There wasn’t any sense of relief - just growing panic. Panic and pain.

Sulla gasped. It just made it feel worse.

“I knew it,” she whispered. “I knew you had to…”

He wanted to yell again. He wanted to ask her if this was just some curiosity to her, if she was just interrogating him for fun. But he knew, he knew, she wasn’t. This was important to her. He had to respect that. Just this once.

“When did you…?” she said softly. “When did you realize…?”

Al sighed, frowning.

“I didn’t.”

Sulla clenched her bag strap even more tightly.

“Oh.”

He was glad he didn’t have to explain any further. He did anyway. The words escaped him like a flood, like the insides of a ship punctured by an iceberg.

“I didn’t think… it was  _possible._ I spent so long thinking that wasn’t me. That I couldn’t be like that.”

He raised his eyes towards her, hands interlocked.

“Until I saw you. And that’s when I knew. All those times I looked in the mirror and hated what I saw. All those times I looked at women and felt… something that wasn’t… something that wasn’t right, but in a different way. Jealousy.”

His low, gravelly voice suddenly sounded strange to his own ears. He reached for his throat reflexively.

“Don’t tell Brendan,” he said, barely audibly. “Please.”

“I… I won’t,” she promised.

There was a long pause where neither of them spoke.

“I realized when I was little,” said Sulla. She seemed to have calmed. He noticed she wasn’t holding the bag as tightly, that she was instead absently running her fingers up and down the strap’s surface. She looked away from him, towards the floor, but there was a smile on her face. “I liked cartoons.”

Al blinked.

“…Cartoons?”

“Yeah. There was this cartoon online I watched. It was about… superheroes, I guess. But they were all girls. They would transform into these  _beautiful_ outfits, like…” She spread her hands out in front of herself, in the shape of a rainbow. “ _Whoosh.”_

Al didn’t understand.

“I didn’t want to be  _like_  those girls. I wanted to  _be_  those girls.”

She raised her head, her eyes widening.

“Oh, and that wasn’t all! There were these stories… the Oz books, by L. Frank Baum? I mean, you’ve probably seen the movie, you know, but have you read them? The originals?”

Al nodded. He felt a smile curl on his lips, but he couldn’t seem to smile fully. That thing in his gut was still going off.

“They were some of my favorite books,” he said.

She grinned. “Mine too! I really liked Princess Ozma. She was…”

“Magically turned into the boy Tip when she was a baby. And Glenda turned her back into her true form, a girl. I remember.”

“Brendan used to read me it,” she recalled. “It was my favorite part, the part where she turned back into a girl.”

Sulla brought her hand to her chest, posing dramatically.

“I hope none of you will care less for me than you did before,” she recited, in her best princess-y voice. “I’m just the same Tip, you know; only, only…”

Al spoke. “‘Only you’re different,’ said the Pumpkinhead.”

Sulla’s grin widened. “And everyone thought it was the wisest speech he had ever made.”

The smile on Al’s face got a little larger. “Good memory.”

She tapped the side of her head. “So’s yours.”

“Heh,” Al chuckled. “I loved that part too. Didn’t know why, though.”

“So… you really never knew?”

Al nodded, looking down at his hands. “Yeah. I’d… heard of it. But I thought, that wasn’t me. I knew I didn’t fit in with… other boys my age. And, after high school, other men my age. But I just thought I was… remember what we talked about before?”

“Weird?” Sulla offered.

“Yeah,” Al agreed. “Weird.”

He thought about telling her that he’d thought he was weird because he liked boys, not just because he couldn’t seem to… socialize properly, for lack of a better term. But then he realized she would put two and two together and it seemed like it’d be too much for her to process at the moment. Maybe she already had put two and two together. If she had, she hadn’t said anything.

“I… never met other kids. So I didn’t know,” she said. For a moment, he thought she’d read his mind, but then he realized what she meant. “That I was different. It just… didn’t seem right. How was I supposed to explain that I wanted a ‘girl’ body, instead of a ‘boy’ one? Wouldn’t he think that was… weird?”

Al scratched his chin. “That must have been quite a shock.”

Sulla laughed, but it was a quiet laugh, sounding like it was more to herself. “It was. Eventually, when I was older, I just asked him. He didn’t know what to think, but… he did it. He gave it to me.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah. Just like that.”

“…Good man,” said Al. “Sounds like him.”

The thing in his gut was quieter now, but it was speaking again. This time, though, it spoke without anger, but with something else. A sense of longing. A sense that he’d made mistakes in his life he couldn’t take back. A wish that, no matter how much the two of them might argue, he’d had someone like Brendan a long time ago too.

He blinked. There was something pricking at the corner of his eye.

“Ah, shit.”

He heard shuffling as Sulla jumped to her feet. Before he was even aware of it, she was on top of him, pulling him into a hug. He didn’t know how to react - he only sat there dumbly, unsure if he should be hugging her back.

“I’m… fine, kid,” he said, but he could feel the tear rolling down his cheek even as he said it. He could feel the tears rolling down hers too, onto his shirt.  She patted his back gently, but he still couldn’t bring himself to pat hers. “Shouldn’t use that kind of language around you anyway.”

“No,” she sniffled. “You shouldn’t.”

“Brendan would kick my ass,” he said.

“Mr. Sterling,” she admonished, although there was a lightness in her voice.

_Mister Sterling,_ his brain thought. Right. Mister. But what else would he be, except that? He couldn’t even imagine asking anyone to call him anything else. Not now. Not after all this time.

“Oh. Um, sorry,” Sulla said, pulling herself away from the hug. “If you want, I can, um…”

Of course. She could read him like a book. Came with having a robot who started out as your clone.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.  _One step at a time_ , he thought.

“OK,” she said uncomfortably, stepping away from him and rubbing at her arm. “Are  _you_ OK?”

Al reached up and grabbed one of his thick shoulders, spinning his arm around in a circle. “Fine.”

“Alright,” she said, although she didn’t sound at all sure.

He stood up, rising to his feet.

“Sorry to make this… awkward,” he said, scratching the back of his head.

“No, no, it’s OK!  _I’m_ the one who made this… weird.”

Al shook his head. “No, not at all. It was… good. To get that off my chest.”

After forty years. Forty years where he’d never told a soul he’d even suspected.

Sulla looked up at him and beamed. “That’s great! I’m glad to hear that… um, Alistair. Can I call you that?”

“Sure. As long as you don’t call me ‘dad.’”  _Or Mom._

Sulla laughed, extending her hand. He took it and gave it a shake - even considering they both had superhuman strength, her grip was incredibly strong. “Deal.”

Without turning around, he motioned with his thumb towards the front door.

“I’m going… to take a walk,” he said awkwardly.

He started to walk away again, back towards the front entrance. He was terrible at goodbyes, but he needed to get out of the house desperately.

“Um, Alistair?” Sulla’s voice said behind him.

“Yeah?”

“If you ever need to talk… about anything… let me know, OK? I’ll listen.”

Al smiled to himself. She was a sweet kid. She really was. So much better than Brendan and himself, in so many ways - he almost wondered where, or who, she’d gotten it from.

“Same to you,” he said, turning around and giving her a tiny smile.

“And…” she added, clutching her bag strap tightly. “Whatever you decide to do. I’ll support you. A hundred percent. That’s a promise.”

Al’s eyes widened. The voice in him screamed. But he took it, shut it up, and stamped it down.

“Thank you. I… appreciate it.”

She smiled at him, before activating the jets under her feet and floating towards him. “Mind if I take a walk with you?”

Al nodded. “Sounds good. I think we could both use some fresh air.”

“Ah, well, we don’t  _really_  need it, you know.”

Al rolled his eyes, but he still smiled. “Was I always that literal?”

Sulla grinned. “Maybe.”

**Author's Note:**

> Check out this AMAZING sketch of this fic by Blue, the artist of the comic:
> 
> Holy crap, right?
> 
> Also, the title of this fic comes from the 2001 Metropolis anime, about a young robot girl finding her place in the world. It seemed fitting!


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